1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to a printing method, and in particular, it relates to a method for handling cancellation of a print job submitted to a printer.
2. Description of Related Art
For a raster printer, a print job is rasterized on the host computer before it is sent to the printer controller. The size of the print job data is relatively large, typically much larger than the size of printer data in the PDL (page description language) format. Due to the low cost of raster printers, the memory size on the printer controller is typically relatively small. Therefore, the printer controller normally can only store a limited number of raster jobs submitted to the printer by the host computer(s). For a print job that has many pages, once the memory on the print controller is depleted for the current job, the printer has to keep the host waiting before accepting more pages for the current job. The host sends data in chunks once enough memory is available in the printer controller memory. In the meantime, because the memory is exhausted, the controller cannot take more print job data from the same host or other hosts.
Sometimes a user may cancel a print job using a button on the printer's control panel after the host computer has started to send the print job to the printer. When a job is cancelled from the printer, if the host continues to send print data to the printer and if the print job is relatively large, the data will continue to exhaust the printer controller memory. A job canceling method has been proposed where the printer controller notifies the host so that the host stops generating and sending data to the printer controller. This allows the printer controller to free up its memory to accept other print jobs from the same host or other hosts.